"Obscure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idea is) to every recruit here. We have at another conference been shown the detail work of supplying our camps both at the training ground and on the hike, and the immense importance of the work of the obscure quartermaster's department. Talk after talk has impressed us with the amount of work needed to drill, to equip, to work into fighting shape, even a few thousand men; and there is no Plattsburg rookie who does ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... eyes in prayer, Turn unto them for guiding ray: If storms obscure their radiance, The great ships ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... better known to the outer world than Cinderella—the despised and flouted younger sister, who long sits unnoticed beside the hearth, then furtively visits the glittering halls of the great and gay, and at last is transferred from her obscure nook to the place of honor justly due to her tardily acknowledged merits. Somewhat like the fortunes of Cinderella have been those of the popular tale itself. Long did it dwell beside the hearths of the common people, utterly ignored by ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... a remarkable man. At a time when the Mediterranean swarmed with warriors none was more feared, none was more redoubtable than he. By sheer valour and tenacity he had fought his way to the front, and the son of the obscure renegado of Mitylene died a king. It is true that his sovereignty was precarious, that it was maintained at the edge of the sword; none the less, in that welter of anarchy in which he lived he had forced himself to the summit, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... of the steamer passengers who arrived that morning. It might meet HER eye, although he had been haunted during the voyage by a terrible fancy that she was still in Europe, and had either hidden herself in some obscure provincial town with the half-crazy Pendleton, or had entered a convent, or even, in reckless despair, had accepted the name and title of some penniless nobleman. It was this miserable doubt that had ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Mrs. Leach's health. Other explanations were suspected; for the new establishment seemed to be on a more modest footing than that in Elgin Road, and the odd arrangement whereby Mr. Leach came home only on Saturday could not be without significance. Mrs. Leach, it was true, suffered from some obscure affection of the nerves, which throughout the whole of her married life had disabled her from paying any continuous regard to domestic affairs; this debility had now reached such a point that the unfortunate lady could do nothing but collapse in ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... may say, about those [234] obscure ancient people, it was ever so difficult really to know, who had hidden their actual life with so much success; but certainly a quite natural dream upon the paradoxical things we are told of them, on good authority. It is because they make us ask that question; puzzle us ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... ones are poor returns for the ardent note you have so affectionately conveyed to me by him on whom we now both alike rest our hopes and our confidence. The more I think of this whole affair, from its obscure beginnings, the more I am quite overcome by what he has already achieved; never did the finest season of blossoms promise a richer gathering. But he has not the sole merit, for you share it with him, in the grand view you take of the capability of this new intellectual ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... reaching almost to the surface of the soil, was entered upon. At the right a wide door led into a large chapel. The walls were covered with rudely scratched names and inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin. De Rossi, whose eyes were practised in the work, undertook to decipher these often obscure scribblings. They were for the most part the inscriptions of the pilgrims who had visited these places, and their great number gave proof that this was a most important portion of the cemetery. The majority ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... courage, popularity, address, and military conduct, raise the ambitious to eminence. With these qualities, the citizen or the slave easily passes from the ranks to the command of an army, from an obscure to an illustrious station. In either, a single person may rule with unlimited sway; and in both, the populace may break down every barrier of order, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... this classing is to make the study of their natural history more easy and simple. But you are right, brother, in the present case; it appears quite useless, and only renders the thing more complex, and obscure. Where there are many varieties or species of a family or order of animals, and where these species differ widely from each other in appearance and habits, then such minute classifications become necessary to ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... obscure performers have become eminent: but there are very few instances in which the descendant of a considerable actor or actress has been distinguished. To take instances within recent recollection, or of the present day, for example—Mr. Elliston has a son upon the stage: with none of the striking ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... as I have intimated, been removing or destroying the vital principle in the food—these vitamines. Clearly the purpose was to make this case look like an epidemic of beriberi, polyneuritis. That part has been clear to me for some time. It has been the source of this devilish plot which has been obscure. Just a moment, Kato, I will do the talking. My detective, Chase, has been doing some shadowing for me, as well as some turning over of past history. He has found a woman, a nurse, more than a nurse, a secret lover, cast off in favor of another. Miss Hackstaff—you wrote that letter—it is your ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... great seriousness and zeal for the truth. He showed very great courage and manhood, and was not easily disturbed. He was not intimidated by threats, danger, or alarms. He was also of such a high, clear intelligence that when affairs were confused, obscure, and difficult he was often the only one who could see at once what was advisable and feasible. He was not, as perhaps some thought, too unobservant to notice the condition of the government everywhere. He knew right well ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... were beating somewhere in the dark. It was the falling of the mules' hoofs upon the bridge made of strong hides lashed to poles and stretched across the chasm. Half a mile further was Tacuzama. The village was a congregation of rock and mud huts set in the profundity of an obscure wood. As they rode in a sound inconsistent with that brooding solitude met their ears. From a long, low mud hut that they were nearing rose the glorious voice of a woman in song. The words were ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Select Letters of Columbus. It has been carefully revised by the present editor, and some important changes have been made. As hitherto published in English a good many passages in this letter have been so confused and obscure and some so absolutely unintelligible, that the late Justin Winsor characterized this last of the important writings of Columbus as "a sorrowful index of his wandering reason."[388-1] Almost every ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... simple diseases of the eye; and he knows how to put gold filling into teeth. His surgical instruments, however, are altogether too primitive. He is personally cleanly; but he has not the least idea of antiseptics; the result is that obscure internal diseases, calling for grave operations, are likely to baffle him. He will refuse to operate, or if he does operate the chances are against the patient.[*] In other words, his medical skill is far in advance ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... difficulties just mentioned it has been possible, after an extended search, to find enough volumes of the magazines to form an almost complete list for the period in question. What omissions there may be are, for the most part, obscure and unimportant publications, which failed to attract enough attention to be included in the large collections of this class of literature. One condition favored the preservation of the American magazines; there ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... so far it appears to be in a certain respect indigent of the things to which it is related. It has therefore, if it be lawful so to speak, an ultimate vestige of indigence, just as on the contrary matter has an ultimate echo of the unindigent, or a most obscure and debile impression of the one. And language indeed appears to be here subverted. For so far as it is the one, it is also unindigent, since the principle has appeared to subsist according to the most unindigent and the one. At the same time, however, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... Our vile and obscure prison, termed The Dungeon, is a farther proof how little that prison has been an object ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... and closed with an impetus just short of a slam, irresistibly suggestive in some obscure fashion, of the entrance of ardent youth. "I didn't think 'twas worth while to ring," explained Persis Dale, nodding to the right and left as she advanced to greet her hostess. "Sorry to be so late. I guess you've ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... open face and his clear eyes called forth in Foma a feeling of respect for Shchurov, although he heard it rumoured that this lumber-dealer had gained his wealth not by honest toil and that he was leading an evil life at home, in an obscure village of the forest district; and Ignat had told Foma that when Shchurov was young and was but a poor peasant, he sheltered a convict in the bath-house, in his garden, and that there the convict made counterfeit money for him. Since that ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... said he would like to 'burn' a brother clergyman—one of the greatest Talmudists and Hebrew scholars now alive—it was only his humorous way of intimating that he was inclined to differ from him on one or two obscure points of historical or ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... easy to assert, that all the souls of the faithful departed were kept in the prison-house of Hades, and to allege in its behalf an obscure passage of St. Peter, to which many of the most learned and unprejudiced Christian teachers assign a meaning totally unconnected with the subject of departed spirits. But surely the case of Enoch's ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... president by the congressional caucus. More than this, it was charged that Clay's support was the result of a corrupt bargain, by which the Kentucky leader was promised the office of secretary of state. This accusation was first publicly made by an obscure Pennsylvania member, George Kremer, who, in an unsigned communication to a newspaper, when Clay's decision to vote for Adams was first given out, reported that overtures were said to have been made by the friends of Adams to the friends of Clay, offering him the appointment of secretary of ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... perplexing in the extreme and just as cultured Indians would be baffled by Italian and Flemish painting unless they already knew the life of Christ, it was clear that part, even the majority, of these pictures would remain obscure unless the character of their central figure was first explained. One further point remained. In many cases, the pictures were not intended to be viewed in isolation but were illustrations of a text. Many were inscribed with Sanskrit ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... as one handles them, to flow mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of desolate marshes, and forlorn spaces, and hemlock-roots, and drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost selves, and for which we ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... were born: indeed every time a child was given to thee they wrapped it in a bit of blanket and putting it in a basket committed it to the stream which floweth by the palace to the intent that it might die an obscure death. But it so fortuned that the Intendant of thy royal gardens espied these baskets one and all as they floated past his grounds, and took charge of the infants he found therein. He then caused them to be nursed and reared with all care and, whilst they were growing up to man's estate, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... bar Samuel, a Spanish Rabbi of the twelfth century, is said to be still recited every year, during the Fast observed in commemoration of the Destruction of Jerusalem. The versifier has been much indebted to a very literal translation, from the original necessarily obscure Spanish of the Rabbi, into excellent French, by Joseph Mainzer, Esq., a gentleman to whom the sacred music of this country is under ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... go into that," said Godfrey, with a little smile, "there are one or two questions I should like to ask you, M. Pigot, in order to clear up some minor details which are as yet a little obscure. Is it true that the theft of the Michaelovitch diamonds ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... this vague conception of God as one, was already in a transition toward separate impressions of the different powers of nature. If the idea of God was without any very clear personality and more or less obscure, it is not strange that it should come to be thus specialized as men thought of objects having a manifestly benign influence—as the life-quickening sun or the reviving rain. It is not strange that, without a knowledge of the true ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... gave himself headaches with stooping to pick up gloves, handkerchiefs, and other loose property, whereof Shirley usually held but insecure tenure. He would cut mysterious jokes about the superiority of woman's wit over man's wisdom; commence obscure apologies for the blundering mistake he had committed respecting the generalship, the tactics, of "a personage not a hundred miles from Fieldhead." In short, he seemed elate as ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Sanghatissa, who reigned A.D. 234 to 246, "caused this chatta to be gilt, and set four gems in the centre of the four emblems of the sun, each of which cost a lac."[2] And now follows the passage which is interesting from its reference, however obscure, to the electrical nature of lightning. The Mahawanso continues: "he in like manner placed a glass pinnacle on the spire to serve as ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... place in the traveler's mind. The progressive ameliorations that have taken place tend to obscure our sense of the old conflicts. A reform once accomplished becomes a part of our ordinary consciousness. We take it for granted, and find it hard to understand what the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... sigh] All this misunderstanding and suspicion is horrible to me. How stupid the world is! There are times when I feel disgusted with everything, myself included! I'm getting old. I'm a failure. I'm losing my time and wasting my life over this ridiculous paper, which will never be anything but an obscure rag. I shall have done for ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... searchlight contained a pair of men tugging frantically at the oars, and a third seated in the stern, grasping the tiller ropes and urging the rowers to exert themselves to the utmost. He wore a cap pulled far down to obscure his features, and did not look up as did his companions when ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... to the children, explaining the more obscure words and phrases as you go along. Encourage the children to ask questions whenever they do not fully understand. Talk freely until you have made everything clear and have secured interest. Then read the whole ballad without interruption. Read with expression and enthusiasm. Show the spirit ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... be present at the marriage of any other friend on earth. This phrase might seem to most people only a pleasant hyperbole; but I am not quite sure that it was so intended. The fact is, she has seen so little of the world at any other hours than between noon and midnight, that she has a very obscure sense of other periods of daily time. She scarcely knows what morning is. Sunrise is to her as much of a phenomenon as a total eclipse of the sun to any other person. She cannot tell what mankind ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... new body is created apart from it. It is the creation of children that causes us to die, it would seem, because if this activity is, so to speak, dammed up or turned aside into new channels, the reproduction operates on the old body, renewing it continually. It is very obscure and very absurd, is it not? But the most absurd part of it is that it is true. Whatever the true explanation may be, the fact remains that the operation can be done, that it actually prolongs life indefinitely, and that I alone know ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... public places where the opulent people assemble, to refresh themselves with ices and sherbet. I solicited employment there, but was refused, and harshly sent away. Not knowing what to do, and not having money to procure a subsistence, I went at length to one of the obscure cafes, frequented by the lowest people. The master of this wretched place, who was named Mehdad, agreed to accept my services. I prepared a bottle of the liquor for which the good genius had given me the receipt, but the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... shall quote a few stanzas. The old story on which Spenser founds his description is told with many variations of circumstance and meaning; but we need not quit the pages of the Faerie Queene to lose ourselves amidst obscure mythologies. We have too much of these indeed even in Spenser's own ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Egypt. But I can show only the main features and characteristics of this form of paganism, avoiding the complications of their system and their perplexing names as much as possible. I wish to present what is ascertained and intelligible rather than what is ingenious and obscure. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... would have out his books and fall to some old critical problem—his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure point—only to relinquish the effort again and again with ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... presents at New Year, and eggs at Easter; he believed in the duties of a godfather, and never deserted the customs which colored the life of the olden time. Maitre Mathias was a noble and venerable relic of the notaries, obscure great men, who gave no receipt for the millions entrusted to them, but returned those millions in the sacks they were delivered in, tied with the same twine; men who fulfilled their trusts to the letter, drew honest inventories, took fatherly interest ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... portrait painters; but there was only one painter for Jocelyn—his own memory. All that was eminent in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and unassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds of living men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilled the interest of discourse with ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... cared little for cock-fighting or the bull-ring, was of placid demeanor, and was altogether the sort of man who could be relied on not to attend secret meetings or lose valued sleep by drilling in hot barns or chigger-infested clearings in the woods. Yet it was on Morelos's oath that this obscure citizen ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... was he, that whatever he might choose to say, his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked like right, and right like wrong; for when it pleased him, he could make a kind of illuminated fog with his mere breath, and obscure the natural daylight with it. His tongue, indeed, was a magic instrument: sometimes it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the sweetest music. It was the blast of war—the song of peace; ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... pushed along in a bath-chair through the park-like grounds of the Hydro. She was Miss Mary Moultrie, and she coughed and cleared her throat just like Baxter. She suffered—she told me it was a Moultrie castemark—from some obscure form of chronic bronchitis, complicated with spasm of the glottis; and, in a dead, flat voice, with a sunken eye that looked and saw not, told me what washes, gargles, pastilles, and inhalations she had ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... more or less, somebody. It must be a very sad change to go home to England and be (comparatively) poor and shabby, and certainly obscure, to have people remark vaguely they suppose you are "something in India." I suppose we are all snobs at heart. Snobbery, sir, doth walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere. A good lady talked to me quite seriously ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... nature of the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins. Mingling in the same crowd with these black-robed pontiffs can be seen shaven men in brown habits who seem in comparison to be both busy and obscure. These are the sons of St. Francis, who came to the East with a grand simplicity and thought to finish the Crusades with a smile. The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikes the eye with an impartial intellectual interest; it has nothing ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... obscure, but the one certain and significant thing is that charges of licentiousness were connected with the Agapae from the outset. These may at first have been unfounded or exaggerated. On the other hand, it is quite probable that just as Christianity continued Pagan ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... parting with her friend, she left upon her mind the impression that she was going home. This was very far from her intention. Her purpose was to leave New York, the city of her residence, as quickly as possible, and flee to some obscure village, where she would remain hidden from her husband. She had resided, some years before, for a short time in Philadelphia; and thither she resolved to go, and from thence reach some point in the country. On ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... echoes of our steps. We often made use of the ladder. By the third time I had recovered my liberty of action, and no longer descended backward, but contemplating with an undefinable charm the gaping gulfs which vanished in the obscure recesses of the glacier, bluer than ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... absolutely; but only because she had long since proved him. He on his part yielded her the deepest respect, both for her sagacity in business and for the fine self-command with which she, an actress of obscure birth, had put the stage behind her, assumed her rank, and borne it through all these years with something more than adequacy. John Rosewarne, like a true Briton, venerated rank, and had a Briton's instinct for the behaviour proper to rank. About his mistress there could be ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... astonishment, this young beauty declined to understand such language. Couched in other terms, he renewed his suit, yet apparently was no whit less obscure than on the first occasion. Such a scandal as this well-nigh put him to the blush, and he was obliged to admit that this modest maiden either affected to be, or really was, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... smoking, monsieur; they must, if they looked, have seen the fire of my cigarette... As I was about to suggest: It would seem to me that there must be some obscure but not necessarily unfathomable connection between the three events; else how should they synchronise so perfectly? How did Popinot know the lights would go out a few minutes after five bells? He was prepared, he lost no time. How ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... a popular movement which had been spreading rapidly throughout that province and the adjoining one of Chih-li with the connivance of certain high officials, if not under their direct patronage. The origin of the "Boxer" movement is obscure. Its name is derived from a literal translation of the Chinese designation, "the fist of righteous harmony." Like the kindred "Big Sword" Society, it appears to have been in the first instance merely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... accordingly was thrown down from a high Rock into the Sea, where he perished [73]in the waters. Execution being done upon him, the rest were pardoned for what was past, which being notified abroad, they returned from those Defait and Obscure places, wherein they ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... press hard on men. It was driving them into an iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. Suicide and madness, obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it. Perhaps, after all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories. And he remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot's final ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... correct unless it be understood to include the negative as well as the positive. For, in truth, the peculiarity of these Consensual Contracts is that no formalities, are required to create them out of the Pact. Much that is indefensible, and much more that is obscure, has been written about the Consensual Contracts, and it has even been asserted that in them the consent of the Parties is more emphatically given than in any other species of agreement. But the term Consensual merely indicates that the Obligation is here annexed at ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... not at all strange when we consider in what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... this word which has been found is in one of Sterne's letters, written in 1740 to the lady who subsequently became his wife. (Letters, p.25). But these letters were not published till 1775, long after the word was in common use. An obscure Yorkshire clergyman can not be ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... and another in contemplation, while a mysterious shape was at the back; the ladies stiff-limbed but lovely faced, and the flowers—irises, anemones, violets, and even the grass-blossom, done with botanical accuracy. A friend of Lord Hollybridge had picked it up for him in some obscure place in Northern Italy, and had not yet submitted it to an expert. Avice, it appeared, had recognised it as representing Leah and Rachel, as Action and Contemplation in the last books of Dante's PURGATORIO, with the mystic griffin car in the distance. Our hosts were very much delighted; ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... received, as I believe, the selling price of a thousand copies of their books as compensation for the copyright.[1] Such being the facts in regard to well-known authors, some idea may be formed in relation to the compensation of those who are obscure. The whole tendency of the "cheap labor" system, so generally approved by English writers, is to destroy the value of literary labor by increasing the number of persons who must look to the pen for means of support, and by diminishing the market for its products. What has been the effect ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... these qualifications to advantage, and a degree of personal courage that even his rivals and enemies respected; but his Angelica must have been an admirer of the opposite qualities, as she chose for her husband an obscure plebeian, whom the very sight of a Toledo steel threw into an ague. Disgusted with the bad taste and vulgarity of those he had already courted, he boldly resolved to prefer his suit to the very first lady in the land. He accordingly laid siege to the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. And who is the true man of culture, if not he in whom fine scholarship and fastidious rejection... develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real spirit, as it is the real fruit of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity; and ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... awake until the sun of dawn was shining in the cavern, although it was at its best a somewhat obscure sun, and the dawn itself was full of chill. When he went outside he found that heavy clouds were floating above the mountains and masses of vapor hung low over the valley, almost hiding the forest, which was thickest at the northern end and ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... multitude of cloudlets drifting slowly across the sky so as to reveal, veil, partially obscure, or sometimes totally blot out the orb of night, may be a somewhat romantic, but is not a desirable, state of things in an enemy's country, especially when that enemy is ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... parotis subsides, seems to arise from the association of successive action; as the tension of the penis in hydrophobia appears to arise from the previous synchronous associations of the sensitive motions of these parts; but the manner of the production of both these associations is yet very obscure. In women a swelling of the breasts often succeeds the decline of the mumps by another wonderful sympathy. See Class IV. 1. 2. 7. and I. 1. 2. 15. In many persons a delirium succeeds the swelling of the parotis, or the subsequent ones of the testes or breasts; which is sometimes fatal, and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... consciousness that all night long, and all the next day—perhaps for even a longer period—many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, without ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... with indigo rub badly. The causes of this defect vary from time to time, and in many instances are often obscure in their origin. All goods intended for indigo dyeing, and more especially when shades fast to rubbing are desired, should be (p. 148) thoroughly cleansed, and before passing into the indigo vat should be thoroughly freed from any soap which may have been ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... they thought, not to be matched in Lacedaemon, yet as his mother truly said, plures habet Sparta Bracyda meliores, Sparta had many better men than ever he was; and howsoever thou admirest thyself, thy friend, many an obscure fellow the world never took notice of, had he been in place or action, would have done much better than he or ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... alliance with Austria, and to throw her into the arms of Russia. But with regard to the Polish-Russian provinces, Napoleon declared he would see what he could do, should Providence favour the good cause. These vague and obscure expressions did not define what he intended to do for the Poles in the event of success crowning his vast enterprises. They excited the distrust of the Poles, and had no other result. On this subject, however, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... in exegesis were not all based on numerals; he is sometimes equally profound in other modes. Thus he tells us that the condemnation of the serpent to eat dust typifies the sin of curiosity, since in eating dust he "penetrates the obscure and shadowy"; and that Noah's ark was "pitched within and without with pitch" to show the safety of the Church from the leaking in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... accordingly perused the letters of Richard Waverley, of Sir Everard, and of Aunt Rachel; but the inferences he drew from them were different from what Waverley expected. They held the language of discontent with government, threw out no obscure hints of revenge, and that of poor Aunt Rachel, which plainly asserted the justice of the Stuart cause, was held to contain the open avowal of what the others ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... afterwards made to assume. At the head of the Dunces at first stood one Theobald, who, with some of the requisite knowledge and aptitude for a reviser of the text of Shakspeare, was a poor creature, and a dishonest one, but too feeble and too obscure for the place. Fifteen years afterwards, (1742,) at the instigation of Warburton, Pope added to the Dunciad a Fourth Book. In it there was one line, and one line only, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... the meaning of this phrase is obscure; but if we take the reading "cered poketts," from the Harleian manuscript, we are led to the supposition that it signifies receptacles — bags or pokes — prepared with wax for some process. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... resurrection of the dead. Some mocked and some put him off by saying they would hear him again of this matter. They felt so proud, their glory and magnificence seemed so sure and enduring, their learning, art and accomplishments seemed so fur above this obscure ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... the American people conscious of their interrelationship and their interdependence. They sense a common destiny and a common need of each other. Differences of occupation, geography, race and religion no longer obscure the nation's fundamental unity ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... well-turned verse. He was a patron of art, having brought back ivories and bronzes from Italy, pictures and china from the Low Countries, and enamels from France. He was a student, and collected the many rare and handsome leather-bound volumes telling of curious arts, obscure speculations, half-fabulous histories, voyages, and adventures, which still constitute the almost unique value of the Brockhurst library. He might claim to be a man of science, moreover—of that delectable old-world science which has no narrow-minded ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the elder of two sons of Michael Johnson, who was of an obscure family, and kept a bookseller's shop at Lichfield, was born in that city on the 18th of September, 1709. His mother, Sarah Ford, was sprung of a respectable race of yeomanry in Worcestershire; and, being a woman of great piety, early instilled into the mind of her son those principles ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the last half of the fifteenth century was an obscure personage named Gonzalo Pizarro. He was a gentleman whose lineage was ancient, whose circumstances were narrow and whose morals were loose. By profession he was a soldier who had gained some experience in the wars under the "Great Captain," Gonsalvo de Cordova. History would take ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to the story, and raises the question, Why should Jesus have been angry? If we can find no reason for his anger, we must leave the thing as altogether obscure; for I do not know where to find another meaning for the word, except in the despair ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... had assumed the character of a prophet, and the tribe of Hanifa listened to his voice. A female prophetess [1111] was attracted by his reputation; the decencies of words and actions were spurned by these favorites of Heaven; [2] and they employed several days in mystic and amorous converse. An obscure sentence of his Koran, or book, is yet extant; [3] and in the pride of his mission, Moseilama condescended to offer a partition of the earth. The proposal was answered by Mahomet with contempt; but the rapid progress of the impostor awakened the fears of his successor: forty ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... pinnatim trifoliolatis, foliolis dentatis punctatis lateralibus oblongis obtusis intermedio ovato obtuso basi cuneato, racemo pedunculato laxo multifloro foliis multo longiore, bracteis subrotundis striatis obscure multipunctatis, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... peculiarities of speech or manner on the surface, overlooking the strength of the characteristics which underlie them. So, in these pages, it seems that we, in analysing the individual traits, have failed to get any vision of the character of either people as a whole. It is the trees again which obscure the ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... understand, to pray that our minds might be enlightened to comprehend it. We read it, as the book itself tells us to do, with earnest prayer; we read it with faith, and we read it not in vain. Soon passages which seemed at first obscure were made clear to our comprehension. Every day we understood it better and better. We had no one to whom to go for information. We had no one to instruct us, so we went to God; we asked Him to show us the ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... by trying an obscure adventurer for attempting to trap a Senator into bribing him? Or would not the truer way be to find out whether the Senator was capable of being entrapped into so shameless an act, and then try him? Why, of course. Now the whole idea of the Senate seemed ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... seek refuge? The Persian Gulf? The King of Asia? The transpacific liner lay far out in a pool of great black, glittering under sharp, white arc-lights forward and aft as cargo was lifted from obscure lighters and stowed into her ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the obscure room where she and Clara were sitting on their blankets and skins. He kissed his hand to the one and the other, and rolled ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Reader.' 'Sonnet decifring the perfyte Poete' followed by the 'Treatise' in eight chapters. 'The CIIII. Psalme, translated out of Tremellius' (half-title, N 2). 'Ane schort Poeme of Tyme.' (O 2). 'A Table of some obscure Wordis with their Significations, efter the ordour of the Alphabet.' 'Sonnet of the Author.' 'I haue insert for the filling out of thir vacand pageis, the verie wordis of Plinius vpon the Phoenix, ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... of one little soul who, with absolutely nothing to warrant the expectation, nothing reasonable on which to base joyous anticipation, had gone to bed thinking of Santa Claus and hoping that, amidst equally deserving hundreds of thousands of obscure children, this little mite in her cold, cheerless garret might not be overlooked by the generous dispenser of joy. With the sublime trust of childhood she had insisted upon hanging up her ragged stocking. Santa Claus would have to be very careful indeed ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... it came about seems to be rather obscure, but it is easy to conjecture his motives. Trained in a school in which scruple or principle were unknown and the man who arrives is the great man, Douglas, like other such adventurers, was accessible to visions of a sort. He cared ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... engaged to correspond by letter. I told you then that you were not to expect any thing either entertaining, or in any degree worth the trouble of perusing. What can a reasonable being expect from an inhabitant of such an obscure, remote, and dead place as Sheffield, to amuse, instruct, or even to merit the attention of a young, gay, enterprising, martial genius? I know you will expect nothing, and I dare pledge my honour, therefore, that you will not, either ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... now. Shall I go to her or shall I write? I resolved to write, and I told her in my letter that I should await her reply at Marseilles. I gave the letter to my late nurse, with some money to insure its being dispatched at once, and drove on to Marseilles where I alighted at an obscure inn, not wishing to be recognized. I had scarcely got out of my carriage when I saw Madame Schizza, Nina's sister. She had left Barcelona with her husband. They had been at Marseilles three or four days and were ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... animals—musk-deer, musk-sheep, musk-rats. I am not now attempting to enumerate the well-recognised odours of animals such as are extracted from them by man in order to "opsonize" himself, but am pointing to the more obscure cases. There is not a very great or marked variety in the odours of fishes; but reptiles with their dry, oily skins give off various aromatic smells, none of which are valued by man. Toads have distinct odours, and one ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... marking, and now and then what seems a thin vein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem, converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata on either side stand up over it like low ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada. For a score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in Labrador. He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land commissioner. Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous cost and tremendous risk. Within thirty years from the time he came out of the wilds penniless, that ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... clothes nervously, and looked hard at Ah Fe. Wanting the quick-witted instinct of affection that sharpened Carry's perception, she even then could not distinguish him above his fellows. With a recollection of past pain, and an obscure suspicion of impending danger, she asked him when ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... remains to be examined the signification of those three very obscure lines which immediately follow the description, already ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... with ambitions which had obsessed his waking hours and glorified his dreams—dreams, desires, ambitions, always before his eyes but out of reach. His hair fell to the opened collar of a homespun shirt, and homespun were his trousers, tucked into a pair of homemade boots. His saddle bore an obscure brand of the United States army, for it had carried one of his people through the War of the States fifty years before, and across its pummel balanced a long, ungainly rifle of an ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... makes up the complex sensation of fatigue. After prolonged mental work, there may be fatigue sensations from the eyes and perhaps from the neck, which is often fixed rigidly during strenuous mental activity; and there are perhaps other obscure fatigue sensations originating in other organs and contributing to the total sensation which we know as mental fatigue, or ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... minister was universally known to be a Papist in his heart. He was of a most avaricious nature, and is said to have died worth four millions, sterl.[178] besides his vast expenses in building, statues, gold plate, jewels, and other costly rarities. He was of a mean obscure birth, from the very dregs of the people, and so illiterate, that he could hardly read a paper at the council table. I forbear to touch at his open, profane, profligate life; because I desire not to rake into the ashes of the dead, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... has been shown in the treatment of obscure and chronic diseases. In many instances persons have been restored to health, or greatly relieved, by the use of mineral waters when all other remedies ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... disfavour of fortune and the fruits of his own limited capacity among the grievances of the oppressed nationality to which he belonged. Years of want, his little dilapidated dwelling—granted him in his capacity of village teacher but shoved away into an obscure corner of Hetfalu—his meagre barley-bread, his sordid frock-coat—all these things aggravated ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... heard and saw no more. There were times when she fancied, from oblique and obscure hints, that the Dominican had been aware of Don Juan's disguise and visit. But, if so, that knowledge appeared only to increase the gentleness, almost the respect, which Torquemada manifested towards her. Certainly, since that day, from some cause or other the priest's manner ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wood-tick, cattle-tick, etc., and mites, are quickly told from the higher orders—true spiders and scorpions—by their rounded bodies, which appear like mere sacks, with little appearance of segmentation, and their small, obscure heads. The mites alone, of all the Arachinida, pass through a marked metamorphosis. Thus the young mite has only six legs, while the mature form has eight. The bee mite is very small, not more than one-fiftieth of an inch long. The female is slightly longer than the male, and somewhat transparent. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... confidence in his own powers which long years of the free, independent life of the great outdoors had given him. He knew the secrets of the wilderness as few men knew them. He had little doubt that much which had remained obscure to those already engaged in the search for Tom Gray would be made clear to him. Alone in the world, Jean had long since come to regard the Eight Originals as "his folks." Of the four girls, Grace Harlowe had always ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... chalk in England and France consist of a pure, white, calcareous mass, usually too soft for a building-stone, but sometimes passing into a more solid state. It consists, almost purely, of carbonate of lime; the stratification is often obscure, except where rendered distinct by interstratified layers of flint, a few inches thick, occasionally in continuous beds, but oftener in nodules, and recurring at intervals generally from two to four feet distant from each other. This upper chalk is usually succeeded, in the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Association, which, as you well know, is composed of some of the brightest men and most profound thinkers in the State; and it was utterly repudiated and denounced as fallacious and un- Christian in its teachings, and calculated to do inestimable harm. The idea of an obscure woman setting herself up as a reconstructor of the religious faiths of the world! It is simply the height of presumption and absurdity," he ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... also, to train the mind to be logical, critical and balanced: it is good to cultivate a retentive memory and to store up useful facts. But if while you are aiming at intellectual fitness and alertness you allow these good things to obscure other and better things, if, in short, you let means become ends, you will never be healthy, because you will miss half ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... from that home of so many happy and hospitable associations, to seek shelter in the obscure and humble chamber of a wretched building in the outskirts of the city. Fortune can afford him but a small cot, two or three broken chairs, an ordinary deal table, a large chest, which stands near the fire-place, and a dressing-stand, for furniture. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Sir Robert Harley, inasmuch as we are in expectation of receiving an account of the various forms of its name from a gentleman who has not only the ability, but also peculiar facilities for illustrating this and similar obscure terms.] ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... and sketches, which are enclosed within the covers of this Book, relate to certain brown men and obscure things in a distant and very little known corner of the Earth. The Malay Peninsula—that slender tongue of land which projects into the tepid seas at the extreme south of the Asiatic Continent—is but little more than a name to most dwellers in ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... with three heads, I could not leave this clique; the ground near them seemed to hold my feet. The canopy of entwined trees held out shadow, the night whispered a pledge of protection, and an officious lamp flashed just one beam to show me an obscure, safe seat, and then vanished. Let me now briefly tell the reader all that, during the past dark fortnight, I have been silently gathering from Rumour, respecting the origin and the object of M. Emanuel's departure. The tale is short, and not new: its alpha is Mammon, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... are obscure and not very trustworthy. It seems that the Outagamies began the fray by an attack on the Illinois at La Salle's old station of Le Rocher, on the river Illinois. On hearing of this, the French commanders mustered their ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... serve no purpose to follow the obscure labyrinth of legal procedure of that period, and to recite all the marches and countermarches which legal subtlety suggested to the litigants. At the end of three years, on the 9th of April 1661, the countess obtained a judgment by which the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... between them. Not only did they shrink from it; Lord Findon could not have borne it. The storm of family and personal pride which the disclosure of Fenwick's story had aroused in the old man had been of a violence impossible to resist. That Fenwick's obscure and crazy wife should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie then was—that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... third story! O ye voluminous historians, who live in the guilt and glory of the past, and are proud in making the biggest and thickest books for the dust, cobwebs, and moths of the future! O ye commentators, who delight to render obscurity more obscure, and who assume that in a multitude of words, as in a multitude of counsellors, there is wisdom! O ye critics, who vote yourselves the Areopagites of Intellect, whose decrees confer immortality in the Universe of Letters! O all ye that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... care was to detain him for that one night. There was a look of coming illness about him, and his desperate, maddened state of mind might obscure his judgment, and urge him into some precipitate measure, such as he might afterwards rue bitterly for the sake of the wife and children, the bare thought of whom seemed at present to sting him so intolerably. Moreover, Louis had a vague hope ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exactly as they were. But, at the same time, something new is introduced; namely, the sense of effort. If I try to discover where this sense of effort seems to be, I find myself somewhat perplexed at first; but, if I hold the fore-arm in position long enough, I become aware of an obscure sense of fatigue, which is apparently seated either in the muscles of the arm, or in the integument directly over them. The fatigue seems to be related to the sense of effort, in much the same way as ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his breath as the two stood there facing each other, so sharp was the contrast. The man, the Mongolian, small, weazened, leather-colored, secretive—a strange, complex creature, steeped in all the obscure mystery of the East, nervous, ill at ease; and the girl, the Anglo-Saxon, daughter of the Northmen, huge, blond, big-boned, frank, outspoken, simple of composition, open as the day, bareheaded, her great ropes of sandy hair ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... from system, rather than ignorance or inability, he chose to be "hard of conceit, and harsh of style," in order that his poetry might correspond with the sharp, sour, and crabbed nature of his theme.[31] Donne, his successor, was still more rugged in his versification, as well as more obscure in his conceptions and allusions. The satires of Cleveland (as we have indeed formerly noticed) are, if possible, still harsher and more strained in expression than those of Donne. Butler can hardly be quoted as ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... picturesque night aspect of these ancient streets and houses that clustered round the cathedral. He had then, presumably, made his way to this old, tortuous and unsafe maze of streets, so full of dark archways, trap-doors, cellars, winding stairways, evil smells, and obscure alleys. ("These alleys," as a local guide-book coldly puts it, "are not well inhabited, but the visitor may safely go through those of houses 5 and 17." Had Dr. Chang, perhaps, been through, part of the way through, numbers 4 ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... quietly reclining under the obscure shadow of the tree, the birds did not notice them, but stalked along the shore ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... clearly demonstrated until the advent of Christianity; when it was proved to lie in a lack of pity. Now pity is not, as is sometimes supposed, a kind of weakness; it is a kind of knowledge, wherewith men are reminded of obscure and neglected interests. It is easy to understand why the Christian revolution should have been regarded as destructive of culture. For it meant not the qualitative refinement of the good, but the quantitative distribution of it. But it none the less marks an epoch in ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... our leader as an old acquaintance, and mounting on a camel, offered to guide us on our way during the night. It is no easy matter at any time, even for the Arabs, to find the way in a direct line across the boundless Desert; and when clouds obscure the stars, it is almost impossible without a compass. The old recluse, on seeing white strangers, cast a look of disgust and disdain at us, expressing his surprise that any true believers should allow infidel Nazarenes ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... expressed what every ambassador of Christ constantly experiences when in the thick of the Master's work. His are the joys of acquisition. His purse may be scanty, his teaching may be humble, and the field of his labor may be so obscure that no bulletins of his achievements are ever proclaimed to an admiring world. Difficulties may sadden and discouragement bring him to his knees; but I tell you that obscure, toiling man of God has a joy vouchsafed to him that a Frederick or a Marlborough never knew on the field of bloody ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... passionate resentment against the rival that had fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the end of the century, a century that had been forced by the contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the same time, from the information of Melinda, spoken of me as an Irish fortune-hunter, without either birth or estate; who supported myself in the appearance of a gentleman by sharping and other infamous practices; and who was of such an obscure origin, that I did not even know my own extraction. Though I expected all this malice, I could not hear it with temper, especially as truth was so blended with falsehood in the assertion, that it would be almost impossible to separate the one from the other in my vindication. But ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... appointing new boards of more seasoned stuff. Moslem and Christian alike were brought before them, and a general accusation of pro-French tendencies seems to have been sufficient to secure a sentence of death or lifelong imprisonment. He aimed not at the poor and the obscure, for whom hunger and pestilence were providing, but at the rich and the influential. The higher clergy in Christian circles, Bishops and Monsignors, were a favourite target, and among Moslems influential Sheikhs. Sometimes there was a parody of a trial; sometimes ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... pleasure in their Sunday evening meetings. None of them was of the acknowledged literary successes of the university: their names were not those seen every week in the undergraduate journals. And yet this obscure group, which had drawn together in a spirit of satire, had in it two or three men of real gift. Forbes himself was a man of uncommon vivacity. Small, stocky, with an unruly thatch of yellow hair and a quaintly wry and homely face, he hid his shyness and his brilliancy ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... rarely travelled by honest men. But not altogether. Another reason has influenced their selection of it while in Natchitoches they too have put up at the Choctaw Chief; their plans requiring that privacy which an obscure hostelry affords. To have been seen with Jupiter at the Planter's House might have been for some Mississippian planter to remember, and identify, him as the absconded slave of Ephraim Darke. A contretemps less likely to occur at the Choctaw ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... resulted in all the dice turning up with different faces. See the notes in Burmann's edition of Suetonius, Octav. Augustus, c. 71. It is said that sometimes they played with four-sided dice, sometimes with six-sided. The subject is somewhat obscure, and the investigation not suited to ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... A. S. AEmtiz. Nescio an sint ab [word in Greek] vel [word in Greek]. Vomo, evomo, vomitu evacuo. Videtur interim etymologiam hanc non obscure firmare codex Rush. Mat. xii. 22. ubi antique scriptum invenimus ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... Minnesota River, early in the morning of the 16th day of August, 1862, precipitated, doubtless, by the murders at Acton on the day previous. The massacre and the Indian war that followed developed many brave men, but no truer hero than Mauley, an obscure Frenchman, the ferry-man at the Agency. Continually under fire, he resolutely ran his ferry-boat back and forth across the river, affording the terror-stricken people the only chance for escape. He was shot down on his boat just as he had landed ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... would it not have required all the glow of his imagination and all the strength of his judgment to believe it? Let us who are seeing the fulfilment of this vision, utter the fervent prayer that no sullen clouds of coldness or estrangement may ever obscure these fair relations, and that the madness of man may never mar the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of the reserved rights of the lodges is very important, and should never be forgotten, because it affords much aid in the decision of many obscure points of masonic jurisprudence. The rule is, that any doubtful power exists and is inherent in the subordinate lodges, unless there is an express regulation conferring it on the Grand Lodge. With this preliminary view, we may proceed to investigate the ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... down their nurses do not run up to them and scold, but pick them up, and clean them, and tidy their dress, and afterwards find fault and correct them. The story is told of Demetrius of Phalerum, when an exile from his native country, and living a humble and obscure life at Thebes, that he was not pleased to see Crates approaching, for he expected to receive from him cynical outspokenness and harsh language. But as Crates talked kindly to him, and discussed his exile, and pointed out that ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... may be safely assumed that, in the year 1845, the power and number of the machines and the number of the workers is greater by one-half than it was in 1834. The chief centre of this industry is Lancashire, where it originated; it has thoroughly revolutionised this county, converting it from an obscure, ill-cultivated swamp into a busy, lively region, multiplying its population tenfold in eighty years, and causing giant cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, containing together 700,000 inhabitants, and their neighbouring towns, Bolton with 60,000, Rochdale with 75,000, Oldham with 50,000, Preston ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... am dumb; my soul is inarticulate. There is that in me which I would pour out. Oh! why is it that the noblest actions of humanity speak not to my soul? All life is inadequate—but not in the sense of the world. I would joyfully be silent, obscure, dead to all the world, if this alone which is in me had life. I ask not for name, riches, external conditions of delight or splendor. No; the meanest of all would be heaven to me, if this inward impulse had action, lived itself out. But no; I am imprisoned in ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... time you are finished—say five years—for Miss Varley tells me you are quite up with the girls of your age in your studies, they will have a substantial country home which you will enjoy immensely between times. You will find that a country home, however humble, is not sordid like an obscure home in the city. So next week, Amarilly, or as soon as Mrs. Meredith can fit you out properly, you will be packed off to an ultra- smart school. There will be one term this year, but I think you should remain through the summer ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... "The Man with the Hungry Eyes," and they were hungry, for life was always a battle to him. From an obscure and humble position, without fortune, friends, or favoring circumstances he had fought his way upward in the face of ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... who thought clearly, who knew what she wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively. Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what she—the whole of her that was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... prosaic place. Yet at every point I have felt how much would have been gained could an old Celt or Druid have revisited his former haunts, and permitted me to question him on a hundred matters which must remain obscure. But this, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... of a nebulous ocean, bewitched into sudden immobility; or a rack of tempest-driven clouds hanging in the sky, momentarily awaiting the transforming violence of a fresh onset. Sometimes continents of pale light are separated by narrow straits of comparative darkness; elsewhere obscure spaces are hemmed in by ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... felon! God have mercy on my brain, for I feel that it is wandering. Father, father—alas, I have none!—had you left me at the asylum, without any clue, or hopes of a clue, to my hereafter being reclaimed, it would have been a kindness; I should then have been happy and contented in some obscure situation; but you raised hopes only to prostrate them—and imaginings which have led to my destruction. Sacred is the duty of a parent, and heavy must be the account of those who desert their children, and are required by Heaven to render up an account ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... has anywhere shown itself unduly, or in a way irritating to others, I ask forgiveness. Whenever peace is made, the world will need a peace built on all the facts of human nature. I have tried to give here some of those which war passions inevitably obscure. That is the ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... he diagnosed a moral not a bodily disorder. We often find in The Nights, the doctor or the old woman distinguishing a love-fit by the pulse or similar obscure symptoms, as in the case of Seleucus, Stratonice and her step-son Antiochus—which seems to be the arch-type ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are talking together in low voices—"You bet, old chap, instead of listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... and that he travelled in Germany. The Shadow of Night, consisting of two "poeticall hymnes" appeared in 1594, and is his first extant work. It was followed in 1595 by Ovid's Banquet of Sence, The Amorous Zodiac, and other poems. These early compositions, while containing fine passages, are obscure and crabbed in style.[v-1] In 1598 appeared Marlowe's fragmentary Hero and Leander with Chapman's continuation. By this year he had established his position as a playwright, for Meres in his Palladis Tamia praises him both as a writer ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... I repeated to myself, as I exerted myself bravely in my new offices, as nurse and housekeeper, "there is no danger of that fair creature seeking out this little obscure spot. She will probably ask Richard Clyde who the little country girl was, whose water-pail he was so gallantly carrying, and I know he will speak kindly of me, though he will laugh at being caught in such an awkward predicament. Perhaps to amuse her, he will tell her of my flight from ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... was an act total, supreme, guaranteed by the whole of life. There was no need to sign, to stamp, to legalize. Speech was held between friends and enemies alike, more sacred than any sanctuary, and man maintained it, with the obscure but just sentiment that it is at the base of society, and that if words lose their value, there is no longer any society possible. Later the written word was considered sacred. And coming nearer to our own day, we have been able to see the masses, guided ever by that quite legitimate ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... took out his guitar. Not by way of payment, mind you—neither Sam Galloway nor any other of the true troubadours are lineal descendants of the late Tommy Tucker. You have read of Tommy Tucker in the works of the esteemed but often obscure Mother Goose. Tommy Tucker sang for his supper. No true troubadour would do that. He would have his supper, and then sing ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of Zeus your father and chant his praise. Through him mortal men are famed or un-famed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. For easily he makes strong, and easily he brings the strong man low; easily he humbles the proud and raises the obscure, and easily he straightens the crooked and blasts the proud,—Zeus who thunders aloft and has his dwelling ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the currency of language, much is defective and counterfeit: but in general the authority of writers who are accredited, however they may disagree, is adopted. The intrinsic meaning of many words, especially the particles, will appear obscure; because they are disguised abbreviations of other words, and, in some instances, are sunk so deeply, that they cannot be fathomed. A protracted life might now be consumed in the investigation of these convenient and necessary particles, including the voluminous efforts of those illustrious ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam |
